Love Flannery O'Connor Collected Works? Readers share 100 books like Flannery O'Connor Collected Works...

This is a peculiar and marvelous book about birth families, adopted families, and “found” families, and how each of these can be equally screwed up.

Starting in Ireland in the 1940s, the story is peppered with sharp, clever dialog and vivid, fully-human characters. I love how the narrator struggles with his own heart for decades, unable to decide what he wants, who he loves, what’s right, what’s wrong, etc.—in other words, all the stuff I haven’t figured out yet myself. 

Coincidence also plays a huge role in this book, basically making an ass of everyone, which I find oddly comforting since it reminds me that part of being human is having very little control over my own life. Painfully funny and brilliant from cover to cover. 

It is rare for a story to stay with me as long as this one has. The weaving together of grief and hope was both heartwrenching and heartwarming. We are created and called to love God and love others. That isn’t always easy or convenient. This story showed what loving your neighbor can look like and how it can change a life. 

I love a first-person narrative that sucks you in, and this compelling coming-of-age story as told by Molly Bolt, is a whopper. Not since the voice of Scout narrating To Kill a Mockingbird has a voice touched generations with its telling of her own story. This was the book that made me want to be a writer. I wanted to be brave like Molly…and brave like Rita Mae.

From childhood to adolescence, and all through college, we follow our hero Molly as she comes into her own about her sexuality with uncompromising strength and flat-out hilarious storytelling. It is remarkable that Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel has not yet found its way to the silver screen and it is the single book that made me want to be a writer. It seems that a story with such a strong roadmap, written long before the roads were paved, deserves a film.… show more.

Lorna Landvik’s experience as a stand-up comic shines through in her debut novel, a Minnesota tale about what happens when Patty Jane's husband leaves her, and how she and her sister, Harriett, reinvent themselves by opening a neighborhood beauty parlor – complete with live harp music and Norwegian baked goods. You don’t have to be from Minnesota to appreciate the regional humor, and the narrative voice sounds like an old friend who has shared your joys and heartbreaks over years of good times, bad times, and all those times in between.

I studied this book at school and found myself coming back to it again and again long after I had grown into adulthood. It’s inspired by a part of France that the author knew well and loved deeply. It was a place of pine forests and great summer heat, and you can smell the trees and feel yourself in that landscape on every page of the work. The book is about an old man nearing the end of his life. He is not a good man nor a kind one: quite the reverse. And yet in these pages, there is redemption: he finds himself and he finds the peace he has longed for all the days of his life.

The title was sufficient to draw me in — for I warm to life’s absurdities, and clowning is one form of absurdity. For decades, I have been actively involved with Humanism, so the absurdities in Clown of the hypocrisies in Catholicism naturally appealed, yet more so were the exposures of hypocrisies in love, relationships, and social and political pronouncements — indeed, in being human. Yes, Catholicism is attacked here, but so, also, Humanity. To quote:  “Goodbye,” I said, “and thank you for so much humanity.”

Mention has often been made of the extent to which Marshall McLuhan was a devout adherent of the Catholic faith. But little has been known about how he viewed the place of religion in the world particularly with reference to the fate of the Catholic Church. This carefully selected collection of McLuhan’s writings on religion provides one with clarifying insights into his views on a broad range of Church-related issues including the nature of conversion, the spiritualism of youth, the impact of technology on liturgy, and Vatican II.  Overall, by revealing that McLuhan viewed faith as a sense, the volume illuminates the connections he made between religion and media.  

Gah! Virgins! I should mention that this book was actually written in the 80s and flashes back to the 50s, but in the spirit of this list (and simply because I flipping love it), I’m including it here. Peggy and Sean are two good little Catholic teens navigating their senior year of high school. Sean is slated to enter the priesthood upon graduation, testing the limits of the pair’s carnal restraint in the final days of their relationship. I don’t think there’s a book in the world that has influenced my storytelling more than this one. It’s hot, hilarious, and heartbreaking… and pretty much serves as the blueprint for my own book. Highly recommend.

Speaking of ancient wisdom: Here you have a manual of right and wrong. You’re not going to agree with all of it, or even most of it. But what I got out of reading this, before I became Catholic, was that some very smart people over the course of hundreds of years had thought through the basic norms of correct action and written them down. The catechism embeds rules for living within a larger framework of reality, built on faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God. Again, most of you aren’t going to believe that, as I didn’t when I first read the Catechism. But the critical thing is the coherence and accountability in this document. Nothing is out of place. Every rule for right action has some connection to the overarching scheme. There are no inconsistencies (this is the church’s theory, not its actions).

And by… show more.

I flew through The Lesiana’s Guide to Catholic School book.

It was set, as the title suggests at a Catholic School. There were a lot of themes that I really related to, such as growing up in a religious family and being scared to reveal yourself true identity to your family and friends. I thought the family dynamics were very realistic, as were the characters.

This book was a very enjoyable read!